


Calls From the Deep

by Elpie (Horribibble)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, M/M, Merman Dorian Pavus, Octopus Man Bull, Tentacles, light gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-25 15:52:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9827375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Horribibble/pseuds/Elpie
Summary: The mer lies listless in the sands, only partially obscured by the long reeds caught about his tail and arms. He does not struggle, only stares listlessly up as blood and breath escape toward the surface. A cloud of red teasing at Bull’s senses, and suddenly all he wants is to tangle himself into the mess of it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Your favorite faerie tale, with only slightly more people eating. 
> 
> The violence is off-screen, but Cullen encounters some not so niceness, if that bothers you.
> 
> ALSO. The magnificent Shae drew me a picture from this au and I love it! Check it out [here!](http://shae-c-art.tumblr.com/post/156264134667/belated-christmas-present-for)

Along the Storm Coast, the water is cold and turbulent, but Bull’s skin is layered thick over fat and muscle and though his prey is often skittish and elusive, there are many plants to eat in the lean times. He keeps shelter in a sturdy cave, where the walls don’t come tumbling down when rocks fall from the high, sheer cliffs.

He decorates every nook and cranny he can with little things that he finds. Bits of colorful glass, smoothed at the edges by sand and surf, and little bits of bone. A little carved statue of the one the humans called _Andraste,_ cast into the sea with blood clinging to the grooves. A glass bubble that seemed to glow from within.

Anything to make his place less empty, less cold.

He remembers, vaguely now, the taste of a shared kill flayed between the teeth, of sleeping in a tangle with brothers and sisters who knew one another by heart as well as sight. He remembers being warm, deep in the depths.

But now this is where he stays, because this is what he has become.

He lies on the sandy floor of his shelter, tentacles billowing out in a mockery of old nests, and does not dream.

Until he finds Dorian, whose teeth are sharper even than his tongue, and whose skin glows in the murky grey of the waves.

-

Bull catches the scent of blood first, rich and warm with the heat from the Depths. His jaw aches with greed and hunger, to dig his teeth into vulnerable flesh.

He propels himself from his cavern with a deceptive ease. Slow, to avoid startling his prey. But his prey, it seems, is not going very far.

The mer lies listless in the sands, only partially obscured by the long reeds caught about his tail and arms. He does not struggle, only stares listlessly up as blood and breath escape toward the surface. A cloud of red teasing at Bull’s senses, and suddenly all he wants is to tangle himself into the mess of it.

He _should_ eat this mer.

His tail and markings, pretty as they may be, mark him clearly as one of the sirens that make their home by the deep sea vents. The ones that so eagerly devour human souls.

Bull should eat _him_ before Bull is eaten.

Instead he cuts away the reeds as the mer’s eyes slide shut and pulls him down into his den.

-

Dorian does not thank him when he wakes, wrapped in the same reeds that entrapped him. His arms are plastered in the itchy green stuff, and Bull does not ask what the sigils mean.

His People do not practice that sort of magic.

What they do, they do not _call_ magic.

And they do not consider it a blessing.

Dorian does not thank him, but he does not complain, either. Instead, he watches Bull from his perch on a higher rock shelf, curious grey eyes clear even in the dim. He watches Bull as he moves about the space, putting away his emergency supplies, rearranging his precious ornaments.

He has not had company in a very long time, and Dorian is a new sort of companion.

He waits until Bull lays out on the floor, tentacles curling again into that sad imitation of comfort, and he pushes himself from his perch and drifts to the floor. Slowly, he approaches, and Bull allows him to come close. Together, they settle on the sandy floor, but Bull does not move to touch.

When Dorian tells him his name, it is with sad resignation. As if he almost _wanted_ to be food. As if he were waiting in the reeds for Bull’s teeth and claws.

For the first time in many years, Bull is sorry for someone else.

But he does not touch.

-

Bull cleans the wounds as best he can with his tongue each morning, and applies the salves he cobbles together before re-wrapping them with more itching seaweed.

As they heal, little by little, Dorian’s skin seems healthier, his eyes clear and alert rather than fever bright. He tells Bull to watch his teeth, and flirts as if Bull could not at any moment crush him with his many limbs.

When Dorian speaks, he does not need to sing to tug at something inside of Bull. Quickly he becomes more than any piece of glass or glowing stone. He expands in the limited space Bull has come to occupy, as if Bull has managed, accidentally, to snatch the sun from the sky and hide it away in his little cave.

When Bull goes to hunt, it is with Dorian beside him, body undulating as he maneuvers through the currents, flashing bright in Bull’s vision. Some part of him will always want to keep Dorian safe and warm inside his belly, but he could not bear to lose him.

Days pass into weeks pass into months pass into years.

They are friends, companions in the cold depths, united to keep one another warm and in their wits. As time passes, the wounds fade completely, but Dorian finds bits of lost human netting and pretty glass to decorate his arms where they once were.

He never quite allows Bull to wrap himself fully around him. He laughs and squirms and sets Bull’s skin to burning with his eyes, as if every part of him has brushed fire coral and will not be soothed.

Bull lets it keep him warm.

-

The thing about sirens is that fish and reeds cannot keep them satisfied. Dorian, technically a juvenile still, has never tasted the flesh of one swayed by his songs. According to the Precepts, he has no soul.

And he aches for one, down to his precious delicate bones.

He aches and he moans and he curls in tempting spirals under the full moon, shifting in the cold waves as if they’ll cool his body down. Bull watches, quietly hidden, from the mouth of the cave.

He has never wanted so badly to be eaten.

But the thing about sirens is that they are doomed to fall in love.

-

Bull cannot find Dorian when the first great storm of the season rolls in. He wakes late in the night, coils empty and the water around him cold with absence. The groove Dorian’s body made in the sand is long sifted away.

Bull’s ears are good and strong and he can hear the screams from the distant surface, distorted by water and aching. He feels _fear_ before _hunger_ , and he knows that this is an omen. It rattles in his bones and belly with all the certainty of the Deep.  

 _You have lost him._ His Tama whispers in his skin.

And Bull growls in the dark of his cave. _I never had him._

-

Dorian returns, again, with a mad brilliance in his eye that stings and rankles. “You’re _Kossith_.” He gasps, all excitement and loss of breath, as if he has made quick time to be here. As if he came from far away, close to the shore.

Bull does not need to ask. “Yeah,” He grunts, and passes his piece of dawnstone—his favorite—between palms that ache to crush something. He places it on a shelf for safe-keeping, the way he once did for Dorian. “What about it?”

“You can give me legs, can’t you? That’s what the stories say. _Bone magic._ ”

“We don’t call it that.” Bull scowls. “And I’m not a practitioner.”

“ _All_ of you have it. I know that. I can feel it in you.”

“You want it from me.”

“Yes.”

“You want to leave.”

Dorian stills, abruptly. His expression is almost apologetic, but the energy of excitement is still strong in the waters. There is no keeping something like Dorian. Only the memory of red clouding the current, of reeds between Bull’s teeth. “I _have_ to.” He says, quietly. Something in his eyes changes, and Bull knows that this is not the same person he has shared his cave with for the past years.

This is the story of sailor’s bodies dashed and ruined on the rocks, of red tears on flawless skin, of reluctant fingers tearing and clawing and passing oozing muscle to plump lips.

Dorian’s voice is a song in the dark. _“I need his heart._ ”

-

“You’ll have to trade me.” Bull says.

“I have very little that I would not willingly give you.” Dorian replies.

“Not possessions. Not anything you want to give.” Bull watches the horror with a rumbling in his belly as he unwraps his old blade, the handle wrapped in the flesh of those Before. “I need a piece of you.”

Survival is pain. Pain is awareness. To be aware is to be part of the whole.

 _The tide rises, the tide falls,_ Bull thinks.

Tama whispers, _Asit tal-eb._

-

Dorian wakes on the shore, naked and aching. His skin feels as if countless cold needles have punctured it, urging him awake, but when he opens his mouth he cannot scream.

He thinks of Bull, who did not smile once. He thinks of Bull, and the smell of tears.

If he does not think of Bull, he will think of the thousand knives that scrape and tear and stab at him as he forces himself to his new feet and puts one in front of the other. For a moment, wracked with pain, he looks longingly back at the sea, where Bull sleeps curled into himself in their little cave, the blade once more buried in the sand.

But then again, there is the Singing, and his lips curl away from his sharp, sharp teeth.

He walks toward the smell of sweat and cotton baking in the dry sun.

-

The man’s name is Cullen, and his hair nearly flickers in the sunlight. He has a slow, easy smile, interrupted only by the scar splitting his lips. And then by Dorian stumbling, naked, into his side and collapsing to the earth.

But he’s a good sort, and drags the strange man to the healer. After all, if not for the kindness of a stranger, he would not be alive.

-

Bull waits in the quiet for the brush of a Dorian who is not really there. He is far away now, too far for even Bull’s tentacles to reach him. As he sleeps, the magic draws his mind back here.

“You didn’t tell me about this part.”

“Was I meant to?” Bull snaps, voice rough with hurt, and Dorian seems almost apologetic. Bull calms. “I told you everything else. Is this really a problem?”

“No,” Dorian says. “If you’d told me I could still have this, I doubt I would have been so scared.”

“You should be.”

Each step a nightmarish haze of pain, voice silent and useless in his defense, far beyond Bull’s ever present comfort and any hope of assistance. His teeth are sharp, but so are human weapons.

“Aren’t we friends, Bull? Won’t you give me comfort?”

Bull feels a swelling of regret. Wants to apologize. Wants to do _something_. But...

“I can’t.”

-

The thing about sirens is that they are bred to stand out, their every movement fluid and graceful and filled with ethereal temptation. They are made to be desired and fed at the expense of blood and bone.

They are not meant to play for very long at being human. Certainly not without some method of defense.

And so, as Dorian stumbles about, shaky on his throbbing legs and pretending to belong in the coastal air that taunts his lungs with the memory of salt, they begin to sense a shark.

Cullen is patient with him at first, mild and pleasant and inquisitive.

“You can’t speak. Can you write?”

Dorian frowns.

So demanding, humans are. No, he cannot write. Not in Cullen’s language.

“But you understand me well enough, don’t you?”

Dorian nods.

Cullen is more than just a handsome man. He is a troubled one, with hands that shake almost imperceptibly, but not from the cold. His eyes are suspicious even when there is nothing to suspect.

When Bull had found him, he knew _exactly_ what Dorian was, and decided not to eat him anyway. He touched him gently, moved him carefully, and bound his bleeding arms.

But when Dorian reaches out to grasp at the golden man’s sleeve, he watches the muscles tense and that proud jaw set. His legs ache, and his stomach burns with hunger. He would chew the tough kelp that Bull ate in desperation if he could.

He feels, in the base of his spine, that it is a good thing Cullen’s teeth are very dull.

-

Sometimes, when he falls asleep, the Bull is awake and waiting. He talks to him about the movements of nearby schools of fish, about little trinkets he has found, and about little discoveries he has made.

He asks Dorian, with decreasing reluctance, what his adventures on the surface are like. Because he has been led to believe that Dorian is happy. He smiles and spins tales and does not tell Bull of the way that men and women have begun making the sign against evil when they see him drawing lazy sigils in the dirt, waiting for Cullen to spare a moment.

He does not tell Bull that the hunger is getting worse.

Sometimes, when he falls asleep, the Bull is sleeping, too. Dorian sinks down beside him in the sand and wishes that those many strong limbs would coil around him tighter than before.

He wants to be close.

He wants to be warm.

Instead, he wakes up.

-

He wakes up again and again and again, and spends his days in a place much busier than their little cave. Much more interesting.

And he hates it.

He is hungry and sore and he misses the cool touch of the reeds and the Bull’s toothy grin. But it all seems to fade to the background when Cullen scratches nervously at the back of his neck and asks Dorian if he might like to take a walk by the shore.

 _“Yes_.” Dorian tries to say, but the air burns at his throat and the sound does not come. He coughs, briefly, and then nods eagerly.

Cullen takes him by the arm and leads him with a firm grip out of the village and down to the rocky line of the shore. It is not a kind place to walk, the knives in his skin only aggravated by stones under his vulnerable feet.

Each step is a punishment, and relief seems so close.

Again he looks out at the water that glistens in the sun, and wonders if Bull is napping or picking kelp or menacing schools of fish.

And so he does not see the knife.

His blood runs freely from the deep wound in his side, staining the hilt and Cullen’s hand with silver ichor. The knife twists, in much the same way Cullen’s features do. His mouth forms, **_Monster_. **

And Dorian is trapped by the pain and the confusion and the merciless hunger. He cannot make a sound. But beneath the waves, the Bull _roars._

-

When Dorian wakes again, he panics for a moment. His clothes are gone, and the people did not like it when he came to them without. He twists uneasily, and the pain blooms new and fresh and ragged in his side.

But when he falls, it is slowly, drifting in the water and down onto the sand.

“Stay still.” Bull tells him, as if it isn’t too late. As if he isn’t angry. As if Dorian does not deserve to hurt. “You’ll make it worse.”

“A habit of mine, I’m afraid.”

Dorian keeps his eyes shut tight, afraid to open them again. He does not want to wake up. He is so tired of being hungry and alone.

He feels smooth, gentle tentacles wrapping around him, coiling gently to bring him closer and settle him against the Bull’s chest. “I brought you a present.”

At that, Dorian opens his eyes. He frowns up at Bull’s gentle smile. _Honestly_ , He thinks. _A **present** at a time like this?_

“You ought to be _angry_ with me, not showering me with gifts.”

“If you’re not hungry, I can take it back.”

“Take what back?”

Bull takes his hands between great, scarred palms, and presses something warm between them. Firm and heavy and _perfect._

“Is this…?”

“ ** _Eat._** ” Bull’s voice is a rumble that sits heavy in every part of Dorian’s body, sending a thrill through his veins.

Yes. Yes, _this_ is what he wanted. His teeth ache at the sight of it, red and plump and chewy. Perfect for his teeth and his belly and his _soul_. But something has changed.

He sinks his teeth into good, nourishing heartflesh and uses his claws to hold the organ steady as he tears the muscle apart. The halves are not precisely equal, but the job is good enough.

He doesn’t bother with grace or pleasantries, only stuffs what he can of his half into his mouth and chews with relish as he presses the rest into Bull’s hands.

“It’s your heart.” Bull scoffs. “You went to an awful lot of trouble to _get_ it.”

Dorian licks the red, red stuff from his lips, nicking them with his teeth in his clumsy joy. “If it’s _my_ heart, then half of it already belongs to you.”

Bull’s remaining eye widens, and Dorian can hear the heavy shift in his breath.

But then what remains of the vital organ is being stuffed unceremoniously into his mouth by thick fingers. Bull’s lips are soon to follow.

-

For all the years Dorian lived alongside the Bull, hunted with him, played with him, and slept beside him in the soft sand, he had never quite accurately imagined what it would be like to be fully trapped in the grip of his many limbs. Bull’s weight is a broad shadow above him, white teeth in a dark face, and Dorian wants them buried in his skin.

At any moment, he could be so easily crushed, but instead each touch is feather light, teasing his burning flesh, brushing over sensitive nipples. The tip of one tentacle presses at plush lips, but Dorian stubbornly refuses entry until another teases the softer patch of scales that hides his most intimate parts.

He whines, loud and half-musical, and his mouth is suddenly deliciously full, the rings sucking gently against his tongue. Strange, but good.

Bull’s laugh is rough and low, his face mere inches from Dorian’s own as he watches him twist and turn in the sand beneath them. “You want to be full, don’t you? You want to be stuffed until your belly is sore and bloated. Never feel hungry again.”

Dorian beats his tail against the sand, whimpering and flushed even as Bull keeps his hands pressed to the floor. He wants, more than anything, to touch. To _be_ touched. To be consumed.

But like this, he is helpless.

He can only wait, writhing impatiently until he feels Bull’s thick breeding tentacle worm its way inside his slit, undulating against his dick and keeping it trapped inside an increasingly cramped space. It feels... _fuck_ , it’s _warm_ and almost blindingly intense.

Dorian’s never felt anything like it. He whines brokenly, muffled by the thickness pressing down on his tongue, and without any thought, he can feel his prick curling around his lover’s, greedy and enthusiastic.

“ _Fuck.”_ Bull whispers, and Dorian’s lips curl wickedly as his mouth is suddenly empty. Warm lips crush against his own, the taste of blood smeared between them. “Never felt _that_ before.”

Dorian’s laughter is breathless and a little bit hysterical. He trembles almost _violently_ as the texture of Bull’s breeding tentacle drags against his own grasping cock and neglected balls.

Bull shifts above him, face flushed as he struggles to focus on Dorian’s adoring gaze even as the odd slick heat envelops him.

“Could never eat you. Could never give this up.” He rasps, and Dorian laughs again, harder this time.

“Ever the romantic, aren’t you?”

“Keep you like this forever. Never let you go, you little _brat_. ‘I need his heart.’ Fuckin’...”

“Then keep me full.”

Bull snorts, muscles tensing as he presses his face to the join of neck and shoulder. Dorian’s claws drag against the meat of his back and his motions grow frantic and clumsy.

“Take care of me. Like you always do.”

One of those wicked hands comes to force Bull’s chin up, guiding him into another bloody kiss, and then Dorian starts _humming._

Bull groans into the contact, his orgasm swelling through him in waves as his instinct to breed drags Dorian tighter into his hold. He wants to do more, to see Dorian lost underneath him. He’s not expecting the sudden scrambling and pushing, the frantic whining of his partner.

Reluctantly, he pulls away, wide-eyed and more than a little fascinated as that lurid pink appendage pokes out, already tacky with Bull’s thick spend, and releases pearlescent strings of his own into the water.

Bull flops down next to him in the sand, unable to stop his soft laughter, “Damn, kadan. You even _cum_ pretty.”

Thick fingers reach down to toy with that pink dick, and Bull nearly gets fin-slapped for his trouble as it retreats back into Dorian’s slit. Instead, Dorian slides up against his side, settling quickly into a nest of welcoming tentacles.

Bull is tender with him, brushing over the wrapped wound in his side with a look in his eye Dorian has come to understand well enough.

He will never be hungry, here.

He leans up to press a kiss just under the hard cut of his lover’s jaw, and Bull rumbles his contentment. The sound echoes down Dorian’s skin, every part of him cradled in the soft sand of the cave.

Along the Storm Coast, the water is cold and turbulent, but here together they are safe and warm.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I absolutely needed to write the words 'thick breeding tentacle.'  
> No, I could not phrase that better. 
> 
> Yes, I googled 'dolphin penis.'  
> No, I feel no shame. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here.](http://anabundanceofstilinskis.tumblr.com/)


End file.
